Twenty years ago my parents gave me a gift subscription to The New Yorker magazine, and they’ve been renewing it every year. I look forward to receiving each issue, and there’s always something interesting and eye-opening to find in it. However, while I admire the writing, the magazine has some strange ideas about capitalizing job titles.

I follow the Chicago Manual, which stipulates that job titles are common nouns and are not capitalized unless they’re used as an indispensable part of a proper name. Therefore, you’d write “Barack Obama is president of the United States,” and “President Obama.” The idea is that a job is a job, and you would no more capitalize “president” as you would “manager” or “janitor.”

The only exception that might make sense is when you’re using the title as a replacement for a proper name, and the identity of the person is undisputed. Therefore, many writers say, “the President called upon Congress to act swiftly,” because it’s clear that we could only mean one person. While you could say “The Pope gave a public mass in Rome” if it’s obvious which pope, you should definitely say, “The pope is elected by the bishops.”

In the April 18, 2016 issue of The New Yorker, there appeared on page 18 this sentence: “Last week, the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published the Panama Papers, implicating thousands of people in a global scheme to conceal wealth and evade taxes, among them Presidents, kings, Prime Ministers, race-car drivers, drug traffickers, and Caroline, Lawrence, Ana, and Tim.”

You’ll note that “Presidents” and “Prime Ministers” are capitalized, but “kings” is not. I love The New Yorker, but this defies all logic. Why capitalize either “presidents” or “prime ministers”? Or perhaps the logic is that royalty is somehow distasteful and therefore the title of “king” is unworthy of being capitalized, like “race-car driver” and “drug trafficker,” both of which are occupations? No matter how you look at it, their choice makes no sense.

• Thomas Hauck is a professional ghostwriter and book editor serving authors of both fiction and non-fiction. For your free consultation, contact Thomas today.